While House Speaker Nancy Pelosi continues to push a federal power grab for elections with the HEROES Act, the problems with her attempted election administration dictates have been exposed. Just yesterday in Pelosi’s birthplace of Baltimore, Maryland, a story came out about how one of her top priorities, vote by mail, disenfranchises people:
Nearly 1 in 10 ballots could not be delivered to Baltimore City voters during the special election in April, raising concerns for the June 2 primary, which is also being conducted by mail.
The data, released by the Maryland Board of Elections late Tuesday, shows that 20,367 of the more than 230,500 ballots sent to Baltimore City voters could not be delivered before the April 28 special election. An additional 4,355 ballots were undeliverable to Baltimore County voters, while 3,886 were not delivered to Howard County voters — about 3% of all ballots in those two jurisdictions. . . .
An additional 660 were not counted because they lacked a signature.
In other words, nearly ten percent of voters were disenfranchised due to the use of universal vote by mail in the liberal stronghold of Baltimore. This problem and others with vote by mail were discussed by RNLA Executive Director Michael Thielen in the Atlanta Journal Constitution today:
Voting by mail increases the potential that ballots won’t be counted because of mistakes, delays or errors, said Michael Thielen, the executive director for the Republican National Lawyers Association.
“All but the most strident Democrat activists agree fraud is easiest and most common with absentee or mail ballots,” Thielen said. “Even Democrats who claim that fraud is a myth recognize that absentee ballots are extremely vulnerable to fraud and voter coercion.”
However, the problems exposed with Speaker Pelosi’s voting proposals were not limited to her birth state. The Republican Minority of the Committee on House Administration released a damning report of her now-home of California's practice of ballot harvesting. RNLA did a Twitter thread on the report:
.@HouseAdmnGOP pushed back against Democrats’ advocacy for ballot harvesting in response to #COVID19 with a new report that outlines the political weaponization of ballot harvesting in California. 1/7 https://t.co/4wl3eysobR
— RNLA (@TheRepLawyer) May 14, 2020
"Efforts to have the chief election official in each state disclose the identity of any foreign national with access to . . . ballots, thus ensuring that the names of foreign nationals who harvest ballots in federal elections would be disclosed, were opposed.” 3/7
— RNLA (@TheRepLawyer) May 14, 2020
By allowing campaign workers to pick up ballots from voters’ homes, the Governor is permitting these workers to violate the statewide directive that nonessential workers must stay home, & it is likely these workers will come within 6' of voters, violating social distancing. 5/7
— RNLA (@TheRepLawyer) May 14, 2020
"No other state allows for fraudulent voting practices like California’s ballot harvesting. Fraud and abuse harms not only individual voters, but jeopardizes the entire electoral process. We must all work together to ensure steps are taken to mitigate this threat." 7/7
— RNLA (@TheRepLawyer) May 14, 2020
Maybe Louisiana Secretary of State Kyle Ardoin summed it up best in a letter to the Louisiana congressional delegation; here are some excerpts:
Speaker Pelosi and others are attempting to exploit the COVID-19 pandemic in order to mandate radical election law changes onto states. . . . The fact that House leadership would try to sneak federal election regulations, nearly identical to those in House Resolution 1, into a $3 Trillion COVID-19 assistance package is, frankly, egregious. Louisiana does not need the federal government telling us how to run elections.
Speaker Pelosi is not the person who should be leading election reform efforts. Her birth and home states' election processes are messes, yet she would use them as models. Speaker Pelosi is exhibit one why federalism for our elections is important.